What a day! Earlier in the week I set up a work day for our MLK Community Garden. Two of our members confirmed and they both brought a tiller. Now, normally, I am not a proponent of tilling a garden as it tends to disrupt the soils natural structure. I made an exception for this particular site. It hadn't been tended to and the weeding would have been pretty immense. So with that being said, on with the tilling!
With the help of garden members, we also cleaned and organized the three bin compost system. Underneath a lot of vines and fibrous material there was actually a lot of nicely broken down compost. Always a nice find.
During the 2.5 hours that we were working out there, we had some visitors. A few neighborhood kids wanted to come over and see what we were doing. A few of my favorite quotes, "Wow this place sure looks a lot different than it did before you got here." And, "My grandma says we are going to have a garden in our yard! I gotta go talk to her about what we are going to plant!" Always great to see young kids interested in gardening. Another visitor was a man who, upon walking by, wanted to talk to me about possibly getting a plot to garden. After giving him my contact information and explaining the basic garden rules and etiquette, he took the information and said he'd be in touch. We shall see but even if I don't hear from him, it feels good to know that our hard work is being noticed and looks good enough to attract other people's interest.
After the ground was worked, I proceeded to put in my crops. I was also able to share some of my onion sprouts with the other members. Behold! A bunch of pictures of dirt!!
 |
| Row of potatoes |
 |
| A double row of onions |
 |
| Another shot of the onions since they are probably the most visually appealing thing here |
 |
| My plots at the garden |
 |
| Another angle. |
Aside from the onions and potatoes, I also planted a double row of dwarf peas, Scarlet carrot, Chantenay carrots, Danver carrots, Paris Market carrots, Tricolor radishes, French Breakfast radishes, Champion radishes, Bloomsdale spinach, Emu spinach, Simpson lettuce, Grand Rapids Lettuce and Flame lettuce. Whew!
One thing I am in the process of doing is getting a water catchment system on site because as of right now, there is no source of water supply. This means that we have to bring in our own water. I happened to bring about 2.5 gallons of water yesterday and it wasn't even enough to wet and water all of my seeds, let alone how much more water these plants will need while growing. At this point, getting that water supply on site is the single most important project to the community garden site for this year.
After I completed my work at the garden, I came home and put my boy down for nap and then got to work on my own garden. I planted much of the same stuff in my garden that I did at the community garden minus the peas, spinach and radishes which were already planted a few days ago.
 |
| Double row of onions next to the garlic |
 |
| Second double row of onions that form an L box around the garlic. Speaking of the garlic, it is looking really good so far. |
 |
| Potatoes |
 |
| Carrots |
 |
| More onions between rows of radishes. The radishes will be ready to harvest in a mere 30 days. Just around the time the onions will start to grow and need more space, the radishes will be harvested. |
 |
| More onions. Seriously... I had a lot of onion sprouts. |
 |
| A row of Paris Market carrots and a block of salad lettuce mix. |
A hard days work but it felt really good to get so much planted.
A few notes:
- Onions sprouts are really, really tedious to plant. Especially when you have 100+ of them. Hopefully it will be worth it.
- I feel like I am a little behind things this year. Normally I would have already had my tomatoes started. I am just going to be starting them today. Part of this may be the weather thus far.
- Speaking of the weather, it's been absolutely gorgeous. 60's and even flirting with 70's for a day or two. Which makes it all the more depressing to see 1-3 inches of snow in the forecast on Monday night into Tuesday morning. I'm a bit worried what that will do to things I have planted. Now, granted, the only reason I planted those crops this early is because they are all at least semi-cold hardy. This means they can generally take a light frost and survive. But, 1-3 inches of snow is a bit more than a light frost. Grrrrrr
- I really enjoyed working with others in the garden. I always love it when I get to work along side my wife and I really enjoyed working with new people as well.
That is it for me. As always, if you have any questions for me during this busy gardening time, feel free to ask!
No comments:
Post a Comment